Page:Ferrier's Works Volume 1 - Institutes of Metaphysic (1875 ed.).djvu/518

490PROP. IX.———— XXII. Obs. 14). His system, with all its imperfections, was an immense improvement upon those which had preceded it. It was an inquiry, not so much into the origin as into the nature of our knowledge. It was mainly a polemic against the doctrine of representationism in all its forms. Other systems had declared that our perceptions were representative of material realities—that the perceptions alone were known—that the realities themselves were occult. Looking merely to the actual structure, and not to the supposed origin, of our cognition; Berkeley brought the material reality itself into the immediate presence of the mind, by showing, not indeed that it was the object, but that it was part of the object of our cognition. The total and immediate object of the mind is, with Berkeley, the material thing itself (and no mere representation of it), with the addition, however, of some subjective and heterogeneous element. It is a synthesis of the objective and the subjective; the thing plus the sense (sight or touch, &c), a unit indivisible by us at least Berkeley thus accomplished the very task which, fifty or sixty years afterwards, Reid laboured at in vain. He taught a doctrine of intuitive, as distinguished from a doctrine of representative, perception; and he taught it on the only grounds on which such a doctrine can be maintained.

15. Berkeley's system, however, was invalidated